Markets

Pipe Bending for the Permian Basin

Gathering, processing and produced water piping, roughly 580 road miles from Tulsa.

What this region buys

The Permian Basin around Midland and Odessa is the highest-producing oil region in the United States, and the piping demand that comes with it is gathering, processing and takeaway rather than refining.

Gas processing is the part of that which needs a bending shop most. Cryogenic plants run stainless and alloy piping at low temperature, and the bends inside a processing train are tight, numerous and code-governed.

Produced water handling has become an industry of its own in the basin, and the piping that goes with it is large-diameter, abrasive service and buried. That is long-radius induction bend work, where wall thickness has to hold because nothing is coming back out of the ground for inspection.

Getting the work there

Tulsa to Midland is roughly 580 road miles. The basin has limited heavy fabrication capacity of its own relative to how much pipe it consumes, so a lot of fabricated work is trucked in, and lead time usually matters more than distance.

Load-out is part of the job on large work rather than something that happens afterwards. A bend that fits the drawing does not always fit a road, and a piece that has to be re-rigged twice on the way out costs more in handling than it did in bending. Tell us the destination at quote stage and it is planned rather than improvised.

Nothing on this page claims a specific job in this region. Spec discipline on this build is that a location page passes on real market facts and never on invented local work, so where a project is named anywhere on this site it is because it is identifiable from the photograph. The rest waits until the customer has agreed to be named.

Quoting for this market

Five numbers describe a bend: outside diameter, wall thickness, centerline radius, bend angle and the tangent length on each end. Add the material, the quantity and the code or specification and the job can be priced. The quote form takes a drawing up to 25 MB.

For basin work the quantity and the schedule matter more than the individual bend. Send how many, to what radius and by when. More than eleven acres of yard means a batch is staged and loaded out properly rather than trickled through the bay, and that is usually what decides whether a delivery date holds.

Tell us the delivery date at enquiry stage rather than after the order. On most jobs from outside Oklahoma the transit is the predictable part and the documentation package is not, so the date is decided by whether the testing and the certificates can be complete rather than by the miles.

Codes and paperwork this market expects

Basin work runs to ASME B31.4 for liquid transportation and B31.8 for gas, with B16.49 on the bends themselves. Gas processing brings low-temperature material requirements, and produced water piping brings abrasion and buried-service considerations rather than a pressure code.

American Pipe Bending is an A.S.M.E. code shop holding the U and S stamps, covering Section I and Section VIII work, and American Pipe Bending, Inc. is listed in the National Board Manufacturer and Repair Directory. Alongside ASME the shop works to A.N.S.I., A.W.W.A., PFI-ES24 and MSS-SP75, and to the piping codes B31.1, B31.3, B31.4 and B16.49.

Non-destructive testing runs here to your specification: x-ray, liquid penetrant, magnetic particle, ultrasonic, Magnaflux, Brinell hardness, positive material identification, elemental analysis and hydrostatic testing, along with in-plant stress relieving. Keeping those on the same floor as the bend removes a transport leg and a handoff from the schedule, which is usually where time is lost.